[ANN] TimeFloats.jl: Converting time to floats and vice versa

Package Announcements
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Hi all!

TimeFloats.jl is a tiny utility package that converts between Julia’s Dates period types (Nanosecond, Second, Hour, Time, CompoundPeriod, etc.) and plain floating-point numbers, using any FixedPeriod as the unit of measurement.

My main motivation for creating this package was the fact that I’ve been copy-pasting tosecond{T}(t::T) = t / convert(T, Base.Dates.Second(1)) from Kristoffer Carlsson’s post for long enough..!

Who needs this?

  • Do you need to convert a Dates.Time to float seconds?
julia> tosecond(Time(13,39,42,652))
49182.652
  • Do you need to convert a Dates.CompoundPeriod to float minutes?
julia> tofloat(Minute, Week(21) + Hour(32) + Millisecond(45))
213600.00075
  • Do you need to convert a Dates.Hour to float nanoseconds?
julia> tofloat(Nanosecond, Hour(3))
1.08e13
  • Or how about converting from a float seconds to its canonical form?
julia> fromsecond(Dates.CompoundPeriod, 92384756.9823465)
152 weeks, 5 days, 6 hours, 25 minutes, 56 seconds, 982 milliseconds, 346 microseconds, 512 nanoseconds
  • Or converting from a float milliseconds to Minutes (OBS: this approximates the result to the closest integer of minutes)?
julia> fromfloat(Minute, 60_123, Millisecond)
1 minute

In short, if you’ve been copy-pasting tosecond{T}(t::T) = t / convert(T, Base.Dates.Second(1)) from Kristoffer Carlsson’s post, then this package should be useful.

tofloat

This package converts any Nanosecond, Microsecond, Millisecond, Second, Minute, Hour, Day, Week (i.e. Dates.FixedPeriod), Time, or CompoundPeriod to a floating number (Float64) representing some Dates.FixedPeriod of your choice with the tofloat(::Type{T}, x) where {T<:FixedPeriod} function. x can be any of the types in the Dates.FixedPeriod union-type, Time, or Dates.CompoundPeriod, while T must be one of the types in the Dates.FixedPeriod union-type.

fromfloat

fromfloat(::Type{T}, x::Real, ::Type{S}) where {T<:Union{FixedPeriod, Time, CompoundPeriod}, S<:FixedPeriod} does the inverse of tofloat: given x nanoseconds, microseconds, milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, or weeks (denoted by S, one of the types in theFixedPeriod union-type), express it as an instance of type T (can be any Nanosecond, Microsecond, Millisecond, Second, Minute, Hour, Day, Week, Time, or CompoundPeriod). Note that this is a lossy conversion, e.g. 2 minutes as Hour is Hour(0) (not Hour(2/60)).

Convenience functions

There are two convenience functions defined in this package for the most common cases where you want to convert to seconds, tosecond, and when you want to convert from seconds, fromsecond.

P.S.
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